Yeah, I think that's a good description! And it's kind of funny that the "easy listening" they go for (in "Say So" and "Espresso") are some of the elements of easy listening already embedded in disco. Though with "Espresso" and "Say So" specifically I think the lusciousness in the arrangement of soft sounds is missing because it's put to…
Yeah, I think that's a good description! And it's kind of funny that the "easy listening" they go for (in "Say So" and "Espresso") are some of the elements of easy listening already embedded in disco. Though with "Espresso" and "Say So" specifically I think the lusciousness in the arrangement of soft sounds is missing because it's put together...I don't know, inelegantly? And what you get is more like a congealed blob of signifiers of lusciousness.
NewJeans seems a different -- there's an airiness to everything they've done. Like I said with the comparison to Dua Lipa, I think there are a lot of different people mining some of the same sounds, but for whatever reason K-pop was much more nimble with it (and in fact moved *away* from the sounds of the "influence" I'm pointing at in "Say So").
I also don't think it's a coincidence that K-pop leaned in to the hipper frontiers of R&B -- e.g. NewJeans working with Erika de Casier, though even before then "Attention" was one of the more effortlessly funky K-pop songs I'd heard in a long while when it came out, sounded almost astoundingly hip -- as American pop was leaning out. During peak the fake-disco era in A-pop, K-pop was drawing more inspiration from "My Boo"/Atlanta bass, Pink Pantheress, lots of much more agile music. (A lot of these terms probably aren't right, just spitballing.)
Not relevant to this discussion but I found this hilarious sentence in an Amazon "editorial review" for Black Russian Expanded Edition and decided I had to post it *somewhere*. Don't know who wrote it, of course. "The chief architect of the euro-disco sound of the late 1970’s, Russian born producer Boris Midney built a state of the art recording studio in New York City, became one of the first producers to fully utilize 48 track recording, and proceeded to make symphonic disco music that completely revolutionized the dance music scene and paved the way for emerging styles of trance, hip-hop, drum & bass and house music."
Midney is very good (though not when he's being "Black Russian"), and he has a very good psychedelic funk single from 1972, but afaict from discogs only one disco track (and I can't find it online), "Hypnotized = Hipnotizado" (1976), prior to 1978, which makes the claim "chief architect" ludicrous. And the claim to have paved the way for hip-hop is beyond ludicrous. Nonetheless worth checking out; is under a variety of monikers, USA-European Connection just one of them.
Yeah, I think that's a good description! And it's kind of funny that the "easy listening" they go for (in "Say So" and "Espresso") are some of the elements of easy listening already embedded in disco. Though with "Espresso" and "Say So" specifically I think the lusciousness in the arrangement of soft sounds is missing because it's put together...I don't know, inelegantly? And what you get is more like a congealed blob of signifiers of lusciousness.
NewJeans seems a different -- there's an airiness to everything they've done. Like I said with the comparison to Dua Lipa, I think there are a lot of different people mining some of the same sounds, but for whatever reason K-pop was much more nimble with it (and in fact moved *away* from the sounds of the "influence" I'm pointing at in "Say So").
I also don't think it's a coincidence that K-pop leaned in to the hipper frontiers of R&B -- e.g. NewJeans working with Erika de Casier, though even before then "Attention" was one of the more effortlessly funky K-pop songs I'd heard in a long while when it came out, sounded almost astoundingly hip -- as American pop was leaning out. During peak the fake-disco era in A-pop, K-pop was drawing more inspiration from "My Boo"/Atlanta bass, Pink Pantheress, lots of much more agile music. (A lot of these terms probably aren't right, just spitballing.)
The difference seems to me to be that Sabrina Carpenter is telling you how to have fun while NewJeans are showing you how to have fun.
Not relevant to this discussion but I found this hilarious sentence in an Amazon "editorial review" for Black Russian Expanded Edition and decided I had to post it *somewhere*. Don't know who wrote it, of course. "The chief architect of the euro-disco sound of the late 1970’s, Russian born producer Boris Midney built a state of the art recording studio in New York City, became one of the first producers to fully utilize 48 track recording, and proceeded to make symphonic disco music that completely revolutionized the dance music scene and paved the way for emerging styles of trance, hip-hop, drum & bass and house music."
Midney is very good (though not when he's being "Black Russian"), and he has a very good psychedelic funk single from 1972, but afaict from discogs only one disco track (and I can't find it online), "Hypnotized = Hipnotizado" (1976), prior to 1978, which makes the claim "chief architect" ludicrous. And the claim to have paved the way for hip-hop is beyond ludicrous. Nonetheless worth checking out; is under a variety of monikers, USA-European Connection just one of them.